One Plus One Yields Many Different Sums

More than anything else, “Stones in His Pockets” is about the fun of performance. Two actors play 13 characters: male and female, young and old, of at least three nationalities.

As long as the actors are proficient and versatile, as are Bronson Pinchot and Christopher Burns at the Old Globe Theatre, laughs will follow. At one point during Friday’s opening performance, Pinchot even led the yuks, breaking character briefly because he couldn’t keep a straight face. Because the scene was broadly comic, the audience simply laughed all the more.

Marie Jones’ play, however, is supposed to be more than funny. It’s also about the shattered, media-fed fantasies of Irish villagers and the arrogance of Hollywood imperialism. This theme isn’t especially fresh--”The Cripple of Inishmaan” also tackled it a few years ago. And on the serious side of its ledger, “Stones in His Pockets” doesn’t really work.

We’re in a village in County Kerry, where a big-budget film crew has arrived to shoot “The Quiet Valley,” featuring the American superstar Caroline Giovanni. Jones focuses on two extras, both in their 30s.

Jake (Burns) is a local who has just returned from a couple of fruitless years in America. Charlie (Pinchot) owned an independent video store in another part of Ireland, but he was recently driven out of business by a big chain and has resorted to roaming around the country with a tent.

Pinchot also plays Giovanni, with a Southern American accent--”y’all” and all. His other major assignments are the hard-boiled assistant director Simon, the older but only slightly courtlier English director Clem and a poorly defined teenager named Fin.

Burns plays the other female role, an ambitious 20-year-old third assistant director who directly supervises the locals, plus Caroline’s accent coach, the film’s oldest extra and its most problematic extra, troubled teenager Sean.

Sean is problematic not only in his life--he’s a drug abuser whose family farm is on the skids--but also as a character within the script.

He carries a heavy-duty burden as the keystone of the play’s tragic elements. He’s actually the title character--the stones were in his pockets--yet he is given very little time in which to develop beyond his symbolic boundaries.

We later hear that Charlie was equally troubled when he was younger. This revelation might have shifted some of Sean’s burden onto the shoulders of one of the leading characters, but it’s too vague and brief to matter.

The script deteriorates in the second act. A sudden burst of Irish dancing that’s required of the extras in the second act is designed to please the theater crowd--and succeeds in that goal. But it’s totally out of the blue. There is no hint that the extras have been told they would do it, let alone rehearsed it, yet suddenly they’re performing it as if they’re accomplished dancers, not mere extras.

The final plot twist is as implausibly upbeat as the ending of “The Quiet Valley” itself--the sort of ending that Jones generally mocks.

The flaws in the script are more obvious the second time around (I saw a San Francisco production in 1999). First-timers will surely enjoy parts of “Stones.” The sights of Pinchot seductively sashaying as Caroline, or Burns maniacally shoveling turf for the cameras, are guaranteed laughs.

The play’s original director, Ian McElhinney, is still in charge. Lined across the back of Jack Kirwan’s set is a row of about 30 pairs of shoes, signifying the many characters, though the actors use only a small fraction of them. A vista of clouds on a backdrop that looks like enlarged film stock adds some dimension.

A prologue in which voices evoke the trailers prior to a movie in an Irish cinema seems superfluous. The play would be better if it were about 15 minutes shorter.

*

“Stones in His Pockets,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends March 16. $25-$50. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.